Pierce Brosnan opens up about losing wife and daughter to ovarian cancer

He may have played an untouchable secret agent, but Pierce Brosnan isn't immune to the very real pain of loss and grief.

The 63-year-old Irish-born actor has spoken candidly about his late wife, Australian actress Cassandra Harris, and their daughter, Charlotte, who both lost their battle with ovarian cancer 22 years apart.

"I don’t look at the cup as half full, believe me,” the James Bond star told Esquire while promoting his new AMC show, The Son. "The dark, melancholy Irish black dog sits beside me from time to time."

Sydney-born Cassandra was a former Bond girl and had two children from a previous marriage -- Charlotte and Christopher -- when she wed Pierce in 1980. The couple had one son together, Sean.

Pierce and Cassandra in February, 1991. Image: Getty

After Charlotte and Christopher’s father, Dermot Harris, died in 1986, Pierce adopted the children and they took his last name.

"There is an incredible cruelty in it all, losing a person you shared everything with,” the James Bond star previously told People in 1992, fourth months after 43-year-old Cassandra's death.

As Pierce's career took off, the family of five would travel together, but in 1987 that all changed when Cassandra learnt she had an aggressive form of ovarian cancer -- the same disease that had taken her mother.

"I was in a helpless state of...confusion and anger," Pierce said, recalling the moment when they lay in bed together near the end. "She was comforting me. She said, 'Please, darling, don’t worry. It’s just a life winding down.'

"What can you do? Up until then there was always something, some new treatment. But then the options got fewer and fewer. At the end, Cassie didn’t want to be resuscitated [by] any machines."

In 2013, more than two decades after Cassandra’s death, Pierce was struck by tragedy again when daughter Charlotte died of the same disease at the age of 41. She left behind her husband, Alex, and their two children, Isabella, then 14, and Lucas, who was 8.

"To watch someone you love have his or her life eaten away bit by bit by this insidious disease, that kind of sorrow becomes an indelible part of your psyche," the father-of-five said at the Stand Up To Cancer telethon in 2014, just one year after Charlotte's death.

Pierce remarried to Keely Shaye Smith, a television personality turned environmental activist and documentarian in 2001. They share two sons, Dylan, 20, and Paris, 16.